who are the kurds? where did they come from? how long have they been there?

there's not really accepted answers to these questions, but i do think there are obvious ones, so i'm going to avoid citations, here. you'll have to take me as an authority on this. and, maybe i even am.

what can we observe about the kurds? well, they speak an offshoot of persian, indicating they're not indigenous to the region. dna studies are sometimes trotted out to back up this or that theory, but this area is too genetically complicated for that - all you can learn from dna is that they've interbred with the people around them, it doesn't tell us anything about where they came from or how long they've been there.

so, some people may try to build some theories that suggest that they're actually the descendants of the medes, but these are built largely on what linguists call false cognates. kurds like these theories for obvious reasons - it extends their history back quite far. and, on some level, iranian-speakers in the region today have some reason to extend their heritage to iranian speakers in antiquity - there is obviously some descent, there. but, there's no compelling evidence to suggest that the kurds are particularly descendant from any specific tribe or group in any specific tribe or place, based on dna or language.

what do the historical records say? this is the fertile crescent, we have a long history here. but, the kurds simply do not appear in history until many years after the islamic conquest of persia. i'll let you look up the exact dates, but i believe the first mention of the term 'kurd' is in the ninth century...CE.  so, that's about a hundred years or so after the fall of persia to islamic soldiers. the term, as it is used in the sources, appears to be less of an ethnic term and more of a word that meant "refugee", "wanderer" or "tent dweller", and they were said to live in remote regions, in the mountains. so, the kurds first show up in history as iranian speaking refugees of the islamic conquests, in hard to get places.

it's always baffled me why this isn't good enough, why it's necessary to figure out the secret ancient history of this group, that appears in the mountains out of nowhere. the first-person histories that we have of the islamic conquests are not exactly the best sources of information, obviously - there's kind of a clear bias, there. they weren't particularly concerned about the fate of retreating infidels, but they were exceedingly interested in making themselves seem wise and legitimate. so, documenting how many people escaped the killing and fled into the mountains wasn't really their major priority. yet, the fact that we have this substantive group of persian-speaking refugees appear out of nowhere does seem to imply that there was quite a bit of fleeing.

so, my hypothesis is that the kurds were actually persian refugees from the islamic conquests, that they are people that fled the (at the time) persian-speaking cities of mesopotamia and fled off into the mountains. over time, they appear to have been converted, and to have retained a prominent place in the region - they were soldiers and governors, and, less often, scholars. but, they were basically just the descendants of the persians that had been there since cyrus.

where would that place them in history? kind of uniquely. they would be expelled conquerors that got stuck in an accident of history. generally, conquerors are either expelled or assimilated - they don't just hang out for thousands of years, while other groups successively conquer.

but, it also means that they are quintessentially iranians and, one way or another, should ultimately exist within a greater iran.

because the region has such a long history, we know who was there before the iranians/persians moved in. the armenians lived to the north, and the assyrians lived to the south. they fought wars against each other; the assyrians won. but, these are the indigenous groups here, not the kurds.

sadly, the kurds were the foot soldiers - the actual killers - in a series of genocidal attacks against the indigenous armenians and assyrians that started in the first world war, and is usually said to have ended in the second world war. but, has it ended? or is it ongoing?

the liberals are supposed to do better than this